M
etaphysics is one of philosophy’s more abstract parts. Meta-metaphysics, the
abstract reflection on the nature of metaphysics, might be thought to be one
level of abstraction too many. But A. W. Moore’s examination of the
meta-metaphysics of twenty philosophers (from Descartes to David Lewis and
Gilles Deleuze) argues that metaphysics and meta-metaphysics need each
other. For metaphysics, on Moore’s view, is the attempt to make sense of
things which is more general than any other attempt; and this search for
generality requires metaphysicians to try to make sense also of this
sense-making activity. Moore’s concentration on the history and philosophy
of meta-metaphysics allows him to impose a narrative order on the evolution
of metaphysics over four centuries. Descartes, Lewis and Deleuze are given a
chapter apiece, as are Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Frege,
Carnap, Quine, Dummett, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Collingwood
and Derrida. Wittgenstein gets two.

Moore asks three central meta-metaphysical questions. There is the
Transcendence Question: can we make sense of “transcendent” things? Then
there is the Novelty Question: can we make sense of things in radically new
ways? Finally there is the Creativity Question: can we be creative in our
sense-making, perhaps in a way that admits of no distinction between being
right or wrong, or are we limited to looking for the sense that things
already make? Moore’s own view of metaphysics is that it is a “fundamentally
creative exercise”. This is partly explained by distinguishing between
“propositional” and “non-propositional” knowledge and understanding.
Propositional knowledge is knowledge of truths or facts; non-propositional
knowledge includes practical knowledge, and the kind of understanding
provided by art which shows things it does not say. Metaphysics, he also
thinks, should put normative philosophy first: “the most important and the
most exciting” way in which metaphysics is able to make a difference to us
is by “providing us with radically new concepts by which to live”. He also
holds that metaphysics is at its best when it employs a mode of expression
which is closer to that of art than that of theory. As for the necessary
connections or truths philosophers have often sought to identify, Moore is
attracted by a view he attributes to Wittgenstein: “For something to be a
necessity is for our stating it to be an enunciation of one of our
grammatical rules”. This deflationary account of necessity is just one of
the many parts of Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy that Moore finds
compelling, and which serve as an object of comparison in many of his
chapters.

By returning again and again to the distinction between propositional and
non-propositional knowledge, to variations on his three questions, to his
own views and those of Wittgenstein, Moore manages to illuminate an
astonishing amount of philosophy. The concentration on meta-metaphysical
matters allows him to introduce and explain many metaphysical claims of the
philosophers he examines as and when they are required. It not only imposes
a very readable and enjoyable order on the story told; it also allows him to
discover order and connections often overlooked. Thus one rich set of
connections is provided by the link between the Transcendence question and
the distinction between what Moore calls “limits” and “limitations”.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus tells us that the limits of logic are
the limits of the world, that logic fills the world. But, Moore explains,
logic does not impose limitations on reality; it displays reality’s
essential features. The distinction between limits and limitations is
employed to throw light on the views of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Fichte,
Frege, Husserl, Carnap, Heidegger, Dummett and Deleuze. Moore is lucid,
judicious, extraordinarily wide-ranging and, whatever his views about the
nature of philosophy, he is an exemplar of all the cognitive virtues.
Terminologies are explained, distinctions are defended or demolished,
arguments reconstructed and evaluated. There is no poetry here.

Logic does not impose limitations on reality; it displays reality’s essential
features. The history of (apparent) appeals within metaphysics to the
distinction between propositional and non-propositional knowledge and
understanding has not, I believe, been told before. As with the distinction
between limits and limitations, the central figure is Wittgenstein. In his Tractatus
Wittgenstein tells us that anyone who understands him will recognize the
book’s propositions to be nonsensical. They must be surmounted if we are to
see the world aright. According to Moore, Wittgenstein was merely feigning
to say something true or false in order to make possible an ineffable
non-propositional understanding of metaphysics and ethical value. From this
vantage point, Spinoza’s knowledge of the third kind turns out to be a
relative of Wittgenstein’s non-propositional understanding, as does Kant’s
attempt to make room for value and faith. Varieties of non-propositional
knowledge, understanding and sense-making are also identified in Bergson and
Heidegger.

Does metaphysics sometimes resemble art more than anything else?

Husserl, too, is presented as a hero of the philosophy of sense-making. And
Moore has noticed some of the numerous similarities between the formulations
and preoccupations of Husserl and Wittgenstein, two Austrian philosophers
who disagree about almost everything. Surprisingly, he does not consider
Husserl’s pioneering 1901 philosophy of sense, senselessness and nonsense,
in particular his claim that logic belongs to the essential endowment of the
world and his account of the limits and limitations which follow from this.
Like Wittgenstein, the phenomenologists who followed Husserl thought of
philosophy as an activity of clarification and of coming to see for oneself.
But such seeing, according to the phenomenologists, is not visual. It is
intuition: gazing at the essence of things. It is often said to be intuition
of just the sorts of necessary connection which, according to Wittgenstein,
cannot be stated: that a proposition has this or that logical form, that an
action which infringes an ethical norm is punished in an unpleasant way,
that ethical value is not part of the world. To intuit is not to say or
think. But, the phenomenologists say, what is intuited confirms
propositions. What, then, is the relation between the intuition of the
phenomenologists and what Moore calls non-propositional knowledge? He
describes some varieties of the latter as practical knowledge. But he also
refers to non-propositional knowledge as a form of insight.

By certain quite unexceptionable criteria, Gilles Deleuze is, we are told in
the book’s final chapter, “one of the greatest” philosophers; Deleuze, like
Kant and Wittgenstein, is one of the great turning points in the history of
metaphysics. Reading Deleuze can indeed be an intoxicating experience –
there is a distinctive Deleuze-Sekt. This is perhaps not unconnected
with the fact that Deleuze is the last figure in a little-known
philosophical tradition which opposes Life to Geist. Heavily
influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson, this emerges first of all in Germany in
the writings of the philosopher, graphologist and ecologist Ludwig Klages,
and of the early phenomenologist Max Scheler. Life, vital forces, powers and
their manifestations, is there understood in a highly speculative and
vitalist fashion and opposed to mind or spirit, to sense and meaning.
Affective fusion or identification with the stream of life – in the
experience of nature, orgasm and hunting – is accorded great importance.
Within the tradition there is a neo-Romantic variant (Ludwig Klages) which
puts the value of life above the value of mind and meaning and sees the
mind, in particular the will, intelligence and “logocentrism”, as the enemy
of life. Many aspects of this variant are mocked in Robert Musil’s The
Man Without Qualities. In France, this tradition combined with
indigenous reflections directly inspired by Bergson and Nietzsche. Deleuze’s
metaphysics too is built around a distinction between life (understood in
vitalist terms) and sense. But he gives the distinction a number of original
twists, some of which are sympathetically expounded by Moore.

Does metaphysics sometimes resemble art more than anything else? Does
metaphysics sometimes resemble art more than anything else? Moore’s complex
and very suggestive affirmative answer – perhaps the most original and
controversial part of his survey – is often heavily qualified. This is
particularly true of his accounts of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida.
Although Derrida’s writings about such oppositions as those between speech
and writing, absence and presence can be viewed as an attempt to induce
non-propositional understanding by using language creatively, Moore
correctly denies that this is all that is going on in Derrida’s texts.
Indeed, he perhaps underestimates the extent to which Derrida aims to
provide arguments which employ the Husserlian machinery of essence,
necessity and essentially necessary possibilities. Derrida modifies this
machinery in various ways which, he thinks, allow him to arrive at a better
understanding of the venerable oppositions mentioned, and many others. On
the other hand, Derrida says that what he is doing is not philosophy, thus
making room for Moore’s interpretation.

That successful novels show things they do not say is the aesthetic platitude
which, if Moore is right, can help us to understand many philosophical
texts. Another aesthetic platitude (of great interest to Wittgenstein and
his Austrian contemporaries) is that in successful verbal art, form and
content are inseparable. The content of poetry cannot be transprosed, in
contrast to the contents expressed by the language of science, much everyday
language and the language of those philosophers who think of philosophy as
an exclusively theoretical enterprise. The prose of Heidegger, Derrida and
Deleuze abounds in formulations which are difficult to transprose. That is
part of the reason why Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalisme et schizophrénie
are such great reads. The former is one of the greatest pieces of
Expressionist prose and stretches German to a degree equalled in English
only by Joyce. The latter bristles with weird, wonderful and often novel
coinages and figures. And if it is true that they employ non-paraphraseable
locutions in the service of non-propositional understanding, then what may
look like theoretical vice or bankruptcy (or worse) may appear to be a
virtue peculiar to uses of language like those found in poetry.

Metaphysicians are also supposed to create concepts for us to live by. Moore’s
favoured metaphysicians are also supposed to create concepts for us to live
by. In particular, they create what Bernard Williams called “thick” ethical
concepts. Thick ethical concepts (for example, the old concepts of
infidelity and blasphemy) have both a factual and an evaluative,
action-guiding aspect. The creation of new thick ethical concepts is at the
heart of Moore’s preferred conception of metaphysics as a humanistic
discipline. Indeed, his main criticism of Wittgenstein is that the latter’s
understanding of his self-imposed task – that of therapizing those tempted
by philosophical theory with the help of descriptions of the way language is
actually used – is needlessly conservative. And he is surely right to think
that some central Wittgensteinian claims may be combined with radical and
innovative uses of language. But if evaluative concepts are the sort of
things which must emerge slowly from shared forms of life, then it seems
that the creation of evaluative concepts will resemble the creation of
terminologies and notations more than anything else.

Does recent French and German philosophy illustrate Moore’s ideal of creative,
ethical metaphysics? Nietzsche’s success in making philosophers pay
attention to value and its variety – sensory, culinary, vital, aesthetic,
economic, ethical, political, religious and cognitive – and his simultaneous
sceptical attitude to naive realism about value, had two opposed effects.
The initial enthusiastic endorsement of a variety of more or less
sophisticated naive realisms about value by the early phenomenologists (and
in England by G. E. Moore) was quickly followed by the tendency to avoid as
far as possible the language of value. In Sein und Zeit Heidegger
succeeds in writing at great length about death, conscience, guilt,
inauthenticity, care, angst and tools in largely value-free terms. His
example has been followed by some of the most influential French and German
philosophers. This horror or disapproval of evaluative language (not to be
confused with Wittgenstein’s pudeur about value), which presumably does not
involve the thought that such language is a bad thing, and which is
occasionally overcome (for example in late Derrida), makes it difficult to
find thick ethical concepts, new or old, in their writings.

Admirers of metaphysicians such as Bolzano, Brentano, Russell, Whitehead,
Sartre, D. C. Williams and Gustav Bergmann (and indeed the mighty living)
and realists about nature, necessity and value must now hope that someone
will give us an account of the evolution of metaphysics to rival A. W.
Moore’s splendid achievement. Such an account might well devote no chapters
to Kant, Wittgenstein or Deleuze.

Kevin Mulligan is Professor of Analytic Philosophy at the University of
Geneva.

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